Category: Thrifty Bloggers

Did you know there are 38 million businesses that are based out of the home in the U.S.?

Yup, in the U.S. alone there are 38 million home-businesses which generate $472 billion in annual revenue. Of those 38 million, 20% of those businesses earn $100,000-$500,000 each year.

What we’re trying to get at is there are tons of people running businesses out of their homes and earning comfortable livings doing so.

Women overwhelmingly start home businesses (72%) for many reasons. They can spend more time with their kids, they like the flexibility, or they want to escape corporate life.

If you’ve been thinking about starting a business at home, check out our list of home business ideas for women.

Start an Etsy Shop

Do you have a knack for calligraphy? Jewelry making? Leatherwork?

Starting an Etsy shop is one of the most popular home business ideas for women. You can do what you love every day and see the joy your crafts bring to your customers.

You can also sell your crafts at farmers markets. This also gives your online shop more exposure.

Be an Online Broker-Dealer

If you’re coming out of corporate financial services, being an online broker-dealer is a lucrative position. Many professionals leaving corporate finance will set up shop at home and collect clients from past dealings.

There are a number of online exchanges where you can purchase investment vehicles for your clients. For example, TripleNet Gateway specializes in NNN property leasing investments and allows broker-dealers to purchase and sell on their exchange.

Explore Blogging

Starting a blog is one of the most attractive home business ideas for women. Blogging can be a highly lucrative business for those who carefully cultivate their online community and boost their web traffic.

There are no restrictions on what you can blog about. You can blog about one of your passions, provide expertise from your professional field, or start direct selling.

Through your blog, you can also sell products and services. For example, you could career coach or write a cookbook and sell it.

Found a Virtual Assistant Service

Virtual assistants are in high demand for all types of businesses. For the most part, businesses or individuals who need VAs are finding them through websites where VAs can post their experience.

This means there is still a gap for VA services that recruit, interview, and train VA specifically for each client. Starting a VA business is highly lucrative, especially if you already have a list of people who would benefit from having a VA.

Offer Coaching

If you like helping people achieve their goals, online coaching might be for you. With so many ways to communicate over the internet, there’s hardly a limit to who your clients can be.

The type of coaching you go into will mostly rely on your background. Popular types of coaching include career, business, fitness, life, financial, and direct-sales coaching. The list goes on.

There’s No Limit to Home Business Ideas for Women

Your mind is the limit when it comes to starting a business at home. You can do practically anything as long as you can figure out how to monetize it.

You can find tons of resources for home business ideas for women online. There are even Facebook and LinkedIn groups where women can encourage each other on their home business journey.

Once you decide on your home business, you’ll need a home office. Learn more about setting up a home office here.

You’re proud of the work you’ve done. And why shouldn’t you be? Your interior design skills are on another level.

If you’ve ever wondered how you can turn your portfolio into a money-making machine, you’ve come to the right place.

Today’s post is all about how to start an interior design blog and monetize it properly. Read on.

1. Upfront Costs

The first thing you’ll need to do is pay for hosting and a domain name. The combination will cost you $10 a month, give or take a few bucks.

If you don’t want to drop any cash into this venture quite yet, there are free options available for you.

You can start a Tumblr page as well as other photograph-heavy social media outlets to books views and readership. After you start to get regular readers and viewers, keep these free outlets for SEO purposes and then move on to the real deal.

When we start talking about “real deal” blogging, we’re talking about WordPress, which currently is powering nearly one-third of the internet.

2. Why WordPress?

It’s incredibly easy to use. You can set yourself up with a basic blog in about an hour.

After deciding on and paying for hosting, you will pick a theme. This is your layout and it’s important to pick something that looks great without distracting your readers. You can choose from thousands of free and premium themes.

One of the greatest things about WordPress is the plugins. There are thousands of freebies and premium tools to help your site. They do everything from linking Amazon products to your blog to help make the site faster.

3. Create Content

Like any other site on the internet, interior design blogs need content. Create a schedule and stick to it. Especially in the beginning, you’ll be using your social media accounts to promote your content.

Make sure you have internal and external links as well as a call to action somewhere in your posts.

4. Monetization of Your Interior Design Blog

One of the easiest, but least profitable ways to monetize is your blog is to throw up some ads. While this will likely only bring in a couple of dollars a month, as viewership increases, you can use higher-quality ad networks to increase revenue.

Do you have ideas for products of your own? Maybe it’s a planner or a downloadable guide?

Give a little taste of these items by using them as incentives to generate your email list. As your subscriber list grows, create advanced or better products that require payment.

Affiliate marketing is a popular way for an interior design blog to make money. You recommend products on your blog and when people click on your link and make a purchase, you receive a commission on the sale.

It’s simple in theory, difficult in practice, but it can be done and you can make some nice money from it.

Wrapping It Up

You need to make sure you’re writing and creating content for yourself. This is your diary. Your passion.

A close second should be making readers and Google happy, as they’ll be the one sending traffic to your site.

If you enjoyed today’s post, you’ll find this one on tips to get more blogging traffic helpful as well.

Running a home improvement blog is really hot right now. People are turning to DIY and home improving today. However, trends are changing really fast and decorating is turning into an expensive hobby. So, these people need resources. They need experts to guide them.

Whether it is a home improvement post or a DIY tutorial for a cool coffee table, your readers will just love it. Really, anything can work, and we are here to help you with your inspiration.

Here are five home improvement blog ideas you need to read now to express yourself or even make some extra money online:

1. Furniture Hacking – DIY Blog

When IKEA, among other inexpensive brands, became a worldwide phenomenon, people were not happy with the idea that everybody owned the stuff they had given money to get.

As a result, they started enhancing their furniture using a bunch of different materials.

Blogs about hacking your furniture turned into a huge sensation, so why not make one yourself? Just make sure that you have original ideas and get your creative juices flowing.

There is a lot of competition out there! IKEA hackers is a great example.

2. Remodeling Blog

Vintage has always been in fashion. So it comes as no surprise there is still a huge demand for blogs about taking old furniture to the next level. A blog about remodeling is always relevant!

However, just keep in mind that you need to find really great, old stuff and monitor their transformation through photos or video including a step by step guide.

You don’t just have to inspire your audience but also guide it. Do not get confused, though. There is a difference between hacking and remodeling. Hacking has to do mostly with new furniture. Remodeling is mainly about vintage items.

Also, remodeling is not just about vintage furniture. Even an article about a drywall access panel replacement could be considered as a “remodeling blog post.” Just be creative!

3. Home-Tour Blog

Who doesn’t love a peek into someone’s personal space? Let’s be completely honest. Everybody loves a secret look into an inspiring place that will help them get a couple of ideas about their new apartment.

Get yourself a good photo camera, take great shots of apartments that might offer some great inspiration and create your blog.

If you want to, you can always narrow the topic and make it more niche-y. Just tour your audience around living rooms or bedrooms instead of full homes.

4. Tiny Homes Blog

“Tiny Homes” is a huge niche these days. And we mean HUGE. People, nowadays, tend to move to smaller places either to save money or just because they realize how little they actually need to feel happy with their surroundings.

Just feature some beautiful tiny places and give advice to people who want to live in one too.

Special Tip: Japan and China are two great places to look for inspiring tiny homes.

5. Or a General Home Improvement Blog

Okay, you can always follow the experts’ path and go for a blog that includes all the different areas this topic can cover. You can write tutorials, showcase home-tours, mention all the latest trends. You can do anything that you want to do, really!

But you have to be careful. If you make your blog too general and make people believe you are the number one resource, you have to meet the standards you set for yourself. And these standards need both tons of work and quality content.

The good news is that ThriftyMomma can make life much easier for you. Sign-up for free and prepare for some serious blogging tips.

Thrifty Momma knows that a blog is a great way to earn money and help other women.

You can get tips on how to travel with your kids and keep your sanity or learn how to lose weight on a budget.

Wondering how to start a mommy blog means you’re preparing to help women all over the world look, live, and feel better.

How great is that?

But there are definite, strategic ways to approach a new mommy blog that can make or break its success. Follow these tips and people will be coming to you asking how to start a mommy blog.

Be Consistent

One of the best ways to build a following is to be consistent. If your readers know they can count on you for quality information, they will keep coming back for more.

But beginning mommy bloggers should also set their own personal expectations for blog volume. Being consistent means dedicating yourself to a certain amount of blog posts per week or month.

Consistency will pay off with visitors. One company was able to increase their inbound traffic by 3000% in a single year by creating an average of 4 blog posts per week.

How To Start a Mommy Blog: Stay Focused

The benefit of you starting a mommy blog is that you know what other mommies are interested in. Plus, you have your own unique experience to share with others to help them save money and live a better life.

The more focused you can be in your content, the better. Share your unique passions and experiences, and your regular blog posts will feel more like fun and less like work.

Whether you’re thrilled with the products at Sock Club Canada, or have incredible hot deals to share, be specific and keep it interesting.

Choose a Platform

There are great hosting sites and platforms to choose from. For beginning mommy bloggers, it’s important to pick a platform that is easy to use and can expand along with your business.

Your unique focus and consistency are the most important elements of your blog. While the platform can make life easier for you in terms of posting and functionality, your content is the key to your blog.

Guest Star

One of the best ways to start a following is to offer to write guest posts on other blogs. Many blogs will even pay for you to write for them.

The same is true once you get your own blog up and running. You can help other mommy bloggers out there share their voice and build an audience.

As long as you are sticking to your niche and staying focused, there is plenty of room for successful bloggers around the world.

Share Your Wisdom

Your content should be interesting enough that if you encourage people to share it, they will. But also, you should share your own experience and build a network of blogs you follow and share from.

Let’s get started sharing now. Take a moment to leave a comment below on your biggest challenges in starting your own mommy blog.

Creating the blog? That’s easy. Coming up with first blog post ideas? That’s harder.

In fact, most people spend plenty of time daydreaming about blogging and picking the perfect platform only to give up when they don’t know what to write about!

Blogging is important for any digital marketing campaign. That’s why we gave you these nine tips to get you started!

Introduce Yourself

This should be your main goal when coming up with first blog post ideas.

Remember, this is going to be some people’s introduction to you. You should at least briefly explain who you are and why they should be listening to you.

Now, this isn’t to say that the post should be all about you. It should also include information that your readers can use.

But your readers won’t listen to the information if you don’t set yourself up as a credible source first. So take the time to tell them why you know the things you’re telling them.

Figure Out What’s Trending

If you’re stumped on what to write about first, this is a great way to get unstuck!

Just a quick look through Google Trends can help you to figure out what’s trending in your industry.

Once you know that, you can identify what trending topics you have a specific insight on. Then you can pick which one you think would work well for an introduction.

Just make sure to include the trending topic in your title and several times throughout your article. This way, it will be more likely to show up when people search for it.

Draw Inspiration From Your Life

Think of the last time you went out to a dinner party, or something similar. What did people ask you?

When you’re talking to potential clients, what are the questions you hear most often?

In other words, what do people want to know about what you do? These can all make great topics for a potential blog post.

A similar tactic is to think of what you wish people would know before going into an appointment with you. While this can be a bit tricky since people are less likely to search for it, you can still make it work.

It also ensures that you’re an expert.

Make a List

This isn’t important for just your first blog post ideas. It’s important for blogging in general.

Once you’ve gotten inspiration from various sources, it’s time to make a list of potential topics. Then sort through them and put them in the order you think you’d like them to go.

Which ones strike you more as first blog post ideas? Which one would be best shared later once you build up a following?

Not only does this help you decide on a first blog post. Making a list also helps you figure out what you’ll be blogging about in the future and inspires you to keep going.

Have a Goal in Mind

Before you start blogging, you should ask yourself: “Why am I starting this blog?”

There are plenty of reasons to start a blog, including:

1. You want to get new clients.
2. You want to get new employers.
3. You want to network.
4. You want to reflect on yourself.
5. You want to get your ideas organized and out in the world.
6. You want to practice your writing skills.

All of these and more are perfectly valid reasons to start a blog. But knowing why you’re doing it will help you to generate more focused and effective first blog post ideas.

Get Your Audience Involved

There’s one thing people frequently talk about in writing: engaging your audience.

A great way to do this is by getting your readers to participate. Ask them to respond in the comments, put a poll somewhere in your post, or something similar.

This turns a one-sided blog into something that is reciprocal, making your reader feel more involved.

This isn’t just relevant to your first blog post ideas, either. This sort of thinking should absolutely be applied to your blogs in the future.

But by doing this as a first blog, you set the tone as someone willing to listen as well as speak.

Know Your Competition

In business, knowing your competition is important. And in blogging, it’s no different.

See what’s trending on your competition’s blog. See what blogs get the most comments or shares, figure out why, and emulate it.

This doesn’t mean that you should be copying other people, of course. But drawing inspiration and providing your own unique spin on topics that are being discussed is perfectly fine.

This way, you can ensure that your first blog post ideas are something that people actually want to read about. And you can provide a different way of looking at something.

Study What Gets Engagement

This is a fairly easy step, but not one that should be skipped.

Take a moment and scroll through Twitter or a social platform of your choice. See what kinds of articles are being shared the most. See which hashtags are popular.

Then, use that research to your advantage. Blog about what’s getting the most attention.

Social media has made it easier than ever for you to see what is catching and holding the interest of your target audience. Use that tool to your advantage!

This is the fastest way to make sure your first blog post ideas are effective.

Don’t Be Afraid to Get Help With Your First Blog Post Ideas!

In case you haven’t caught on by now, blogging takes a lot of time and dedication.

Luckily, you don’t have to do it alone! There are plenty of services available for people who are looking to start a blog for their business. As with anything, you have to weigh cost vs quality, but we’ve heard nothing but good things about this blog writing service.